ARTS & FARCES internet

Censorship

One of the arguments the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) used in favor of the US government blocking peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing was that blocking all filesharing would block child pornography. Now the trade association is back with an even more specious argument for governments across the globe, including the US: Erect a firewall to block piracy and use it to block sites like Wikileaks that embarrass you. As Cory Doctorow writes on BoingBoing, at least some of the populace thinks “the government had the right to cover up murder and torture by blocking Wikileaks.”

Google has released a transparency tool showing the origin of government requests to remove information or provide information about users as well as the countries that block access to Google’s services.

ESRD

Amgen has voluntarily recalled certain lots of its Epogen and Procrit (epoetin alfa) products that may contain glass flakes—called lamellae—that are very hard to see. According to the company, the lamellae “result from the interaction of the formulation with glass vials over the shelf life of the product.” Adverse events related to receiving either product intravenously “include embolic, thrombotic, and other vascular events.”

Internet

Six Apart, the company behind the Movable Type content management system has been acquired by advertising network Video Egg. The new company will be renamed SAY Media with the stated intent to expand Video Egg’s online advertising. According to Verne G. Kopytoff, writing for the New York Times, “Six Apart’s flagship blogging products” will continue to be available. All reports I’ve seen are curiously silent on whether or not Movable Type will continued to be actively developed. Kopytoff quotes Andrew Anker, Six Apart executive vice president, as saying “What bloggers really want… isn’t better technology for allowing comments, but a way to support their livelihoods.” If advertising is Anker’s answer—as apparently it is—it’s a safe bet the answer to the Movable Type active development question is therein embedded. As Ben Parr, writing for Mashable, opines, “The new entity is clearly focused on building out a new-age advertising network, not on building out a blogging platform to compete with WordPress or Tumblr.” It’s a shame; the University of Minnesota’s UMThink system—a system I use daily as the senior editor/ecommunications manager for the University’s College of Design—is built on Movable Type.

Law

US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents raided the homes of five antiwar activists and the office of the Anti-War Commitee in Minneapolis as part of an investigation of “activities concerning the material support of terrorism.” Computers, mobile phones, and documents were seized during the execution of federal search warrants related to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The warrants covered information related to recruitment and foreign travel on behalf of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization as well as information pertaining to support of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Hezbollah. Ted Dooley, an attorney representing one of the subjects told Randy Furst and Abby Simons, writing for the Star Tribune, the raids were “a probe into the political beliefs of American citizens and any organization anywhere that opposes the American imperial design.” Subpoenas were served on the activists to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago. Bruce Nestor, another attorney with professional ties to the activists told Furst and Simons, “There is no process whereby you can contest the designation [of support for foreign organizations designated as terrorist by the president’s executive order]. Ever since these laws were passed in 1996, there is a concern that they reach so broadly as to certainly chill or intimidate people in speaking out on foreign policy or support for groups that oppose US foreign policy.” The Uptake has on-the-spot video of one of the raids and related pieces.

Google has awarded US$2 million to Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit run by Carl Malamud, intent on enabling online access to US public government documents. The Google grant, one of the Project 10^100 grants, will support Malamud’s Law.Gov initiative in continuing work to make all US primary legal materials freely available. The grant came at an especially good time; Malamud had, the day before, put himself—the organization’s only full-time employee—on temporary involuntary furlough.

Media

Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post, has been hinting at it to anyone who would listen for quite some time. This week he came right out and referred to internet content aggregators (.pdf; 102KB) in general—and Arianna Huffington, founder and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post—in particular, as “primarily parasites living off journalism produced by others.” Huffington, always spoiling for a fight with the old media guard, told Keach Hagey, writing for Politico, “Once again, some in the old media have decided that the best way to save, if not journalism, at least themselves, is by pointing fingers and calling names.” Jack Shafer, writing for Slate (a Washington Post media property), extends the parasite biology metaphor by asking if the Huffington Post is “engaging in commensalism, deriving nourishment from another species without harming it? Or should the charge against the site be amensalism—that is, depriving another organism of food, such as when a towering plant destroys a smaller plant by depriving it of sunshine?” As Hagey notes, the Huffington Post has recently begun hiring top-line journalists away from old-line media properties, including Howard Fineman (Newsweek) and Peter Goodman (New York Times). There will almost certainly be more.

Politics

Spencer MacColl, writing for Open Secrets, has a tremendous breakdown of who spends more attempting to drive US politics: David and Charles Koch or George Soros. Soros as an individual outspends the Koch brothers in funding nonprofit, tax-exempt 527 groups by a factor of more than eight (US$34.2 million to US$4.06 million). The Kochs organizationally spent much more than Soros on institutional lobbying, 527 groups, and political action committees, US$57.4 million to US$12.8 million.

US Senate Republicans have blocked legislation that would require corporations and unions to disclose their spending on political advertising. For the second time, on a 59-39 vote; a single vote shy of passing the measure. Jonathan D. Salant and Kristin Jenson, writing for Bloomberg, report “During the first three weeks of September, groups aiding Republican candidates spent more than US$17 million, almost seven times as much the US$2.6 million spent by Democratic-leaning groups, Federal Election Commission reports show. Groups that don’t disclose their donors accounted for more than one-third of the spending to aid Republican candidates.” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) once again confuses money and political donations with political speech. It’s not and would be settled once and for all if the US Congress (unlikely) or US Supreme Court (even more unlikely) would aggressively pursue reversing corporate personhood.

Publishing

IDEO—a leading design consulting firm—has published a five-minute video of its vision for the future of the book (video; 4:54). The first iteration, “Nelson,” aims to show the bigger picture through what appears to be some form of aggregation, embedded analysis and source checking, and immediate metrics combined with a very coarse layer of transclusion (“referenced in”/“referenced by”). The “Coupland” iteration is shared reading lists that can be project- or topic-based. “Alice” makes narrative fiction interactive in a way that is quite disturbing. Hidden parallel chapters, for example, become unlocked and available (only?) when the reader arrives at a certain geographic location. The end-result is nonlinear narrative fiction, something that Mark Bernstein at Eastgate Systems has been working on for several decades.

Steven Johnson has produced a video (video; 4:07) for his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Many really good, really big ideas simmer for a long time—what Johnson calls the “slow hunch”—and bump up against other simmering ideas. Johnson advocates the creation of spaces—physical and virtual—that enable connecting these disparate hunches. As Johnson says, “chance favors the connected mind.”

Ted Nelson‘s perennially threatened autobiography, POSSIPLEX: Movies, Intellect, Creative Control, My Computer Life and the Fight for Civilization, is finally going to see the light of day. The San Jose Tech Museum and the Internet Archive are holding publication parties on Wednesday 6 October 2010 and Friday 8 October 2010, respectively. [Disclosure: I worked with Ted Nelson briefly in the mid-1990s on pitching his biography; I was unable to find an interested publisher.]

Technology

As expected, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has unanimously approved a proposal to open the “white-space” bandwidth (.pdf; 495KB) television broadcasters vacated in the conversion to digital television. The bandwidth will be used for high-speed wireless broadband networks and other unlicensed applications, including—possibly—a smart electricity grid. Because the freed spectrum airwaves are low-frequency, they can travel much further and can better penetrate obstructions like walls and trees. Wireless broadband networks would be able to cover an entire university or corporate campus at speeds up to 40Mbits per second (with an expected update offering bandwidth up to 1Gbit per second. “One of the great lessons that I quickly learned here at the FCC is the power of technology to turn scarcity into abundance,” FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps told Edward Wyatt, writing for the New York Times. “I look forward to seeing new devices widely available in consumer markets next year.” The new devices will be required to query a geolocation database before transmitting in order to avoid interfering with existing television channels and wireless microphones. Unfortunately, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell used his comment time to declare the newly available bandwidth would render the need for open access or network neutrality moot. As usual, Glenn Fleishman provides excellent plumbing analysis, raising concern about the overhyping of the new spectrum allocation: “You can have distance or speed but not both: the more area you cover, the more users you cover, the more you have contention for air space or time slots, and the less bandwidth available to each user.”

Engadget’s Rick Karr has a really good interview with Tim Wu (video; 35:20), law professor at Columbia and long-time network neutrality advocate. Wu maintains that regardless of wired or wireless networks, the four freedoms—at minimum—must be provided: Any site; any application; any device; and transparency. Wu notes that the biggest problem with the Google-Verizon agreement is that transparency is the only requirement. Any information can be blocked by the service provider so long as it’s disclosed in the fine print of the user agreement.

User experience

I’ve been thinking that gestural interfaces would be introduced Real Soon Now since, oh, about 1992. Apple’s iOS touch interface brought things a couple of steps closer, of course, but its just not quite there yet. John Underkoffler’s TED presentation (video; 15:54) was recently published online and it demonstrates quite clearly just how close (and how far) we are to real-world geometry (space) interfaces. Three-dimensional image fly-throughs, visual navigation of a SQL database, and usable editing environments that are very compelling are all here starting at about the 06:30 mark of this video. Underkoffler was the technology advisor for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and the inventor of the g-speak computing interface used in the film.

David Sleight has released Gridulator, a web app for calculating grids (in nice round numbers) from the width and number of columns you provide. Gridulator returns all reasonable column and gutter widths. It uses the canvas element to provide inline previews and returns full-size .png image files on request.